Hennessey was tapped to serve as senior counsel for the DOJ’s National Security Division.
Susan Hennessey, the Biden administration’s pick to serve as senior counsel for the National Security Division at the Justice Department, made a name for herself during the Trump years by pushing the infamous Russian-collusion narrative and flaunting her partisan credentials on Twitter and live television.
Hennessey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, executive editor at its Lawfare blog, and a CNN legal analyst, rivals Neera Tanden — who was forced to withdraw from consideration as director of the Office of Management and Budget just a few months ago — for her partisan output. Like Tanden, the arguments, statements, and tweets Hennessey has made in her private roles have caused some to question whether she’s well-suited for a job in government. But, unlike Tanden, Hennesey’s partisanship won’t be put on display during a protracted confirmation process and likely won’t be exposed as she goes about her work in the national-security bureaucracy, far from congressional oversight.
Perhaps anticipating that her social-media footprint could become an obstacle in her transition to government work, Hennessey has deleted most of her Twitter history.
Benjamin Wittes, a colleague at Lawfare, has suggested that the deletion of Hennessey’s controversial tweets is purely coincidental.
But evidence of Hennessey’s partisanship remains in the form of her written work. As far back as 2016, Hennessey was entertaining the idea that Donald Trump, then a candidate for president of the United States, was acting as an agent of the Russian government.
Hennessey conceded at the time that “there is no evidence at all that Trump has engaged in or abetted clandestine espionage activity himself,” but that didn’t stop her from suggesting that the president of the United States was doing the job of a foreign intelligence agent.
“Who needs an agent when you get so much for free?” she wondered.
After the now-largely discredited Steele Dossier went public, Hennessey praised journalists for their “integrity” in disseminating what amounted to a collection of politically explosive, unvetted opposition research against a particularly disliked candidate.
“While the documents have not been validated, the government continues to take them seriously for some reason” she wrote, implying that there must be something to Steele’s work since the FBI briefed Trump on it. Her comment ignores that partisans within the intelligence community often leak news of these so-called defensive briefings to gin up negative coverage of the briefing’s subject.
In addition to her social media-ranting, Hennessey also had no issue giving entirely speculative — yet supremely confident — quotes to reporters covering the Russia-collusion story.
Appearing as the only on-the-record source in a January 2017 McClatchey article, Hennessey cautioned that if a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant had been issued against the Trump campaign — she had no knowledge of whether one had been issued — it could never have been granted based on Steele’s salacious and unverified dossier.
“If, in fact, law enforcement has obtained a FISA warrant, that is an indication that additional evidence exists outside of the dossier,” she said.
Not only was she happy to make categorical statements about the impossibility of the FISA court relying on the Steele dossier — statements that ultimately proved false — she insulted those who disagreed, namely Representative Devin Nunes (R., Calif.), then-head of the House Intelligence Committee.
Hennessey said Nunes’s “lack of knowledge is outright alarming,” and insisted that criticism of the FISA warrants — which Inspector General Michael Horowitz later found to be fatally flawed — could only be motivated by partisanship.
Even after Horowitz found that the Steele dossier “played a central and essential role in the FBI’s and Department’s decision to seek the FISA order,” Hennessey stuck to her guns.
“I don’t think the IG findings are significant enough to justify the work of a podcast,” she wrote in a Lawfare blog, asserting simply that “the investigations were properly predicated.”
As Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe continued, Hennessey repeatedly suggested that his findings would spell disaster for the Trump White House. She kept this up for the better part of two years before Mueller released a report which found no evidence that members of the campaign colluded with the Kremlin to affect the election.
“We’re reading the tea leaves here, it would not be surprising if we saw a number of indictments coming from this point,” Hennessey predicted during a CNN appearance in November 2018.
During a separate appearance one month later, after Michael Cohen was charged, Hennessey claimed that “we can say without exaggeration that if Donald Trump was not currently president of the United States, he would be under indictment, or he would be imminently under indictment.”
She’s also jumped to the defense of Peter Strzok, the FBI agent who reassured his colleague and lover Lisa Page that Trump would never become president — “We’ll stop it,” Strzok told Page in August 2016. Strzok was instrumental in the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation of Trump-Russia collusion during the 2016 election and later joined Mueller’s team.
After Strzok testified to Congress about his texts with Page in July 2018, Hennessey vociferously defended him and accused Republicans of unfair ad hominem attacks.
“If you can’t discredit the investigation, you try and discredit the investigator,” she wrote.
While Hennessey was willing to extend charity to Strzok, despite documented evidence of his mendacity, she wouldn’t do the same for Brett Kavanaugh when he was accused of sexual assault by Christine Blasey Ford.
Appearing on CNN, Hennessey immediately dropped any pretense of neutrality, choosing to weigh in before the facts were in evidence, as she did during so many Russiagate news cycles. She called the allegation against Kavanaugh “credible” despite the lack of contemporaneous corroboration and questioned whether Kavanaugh could remain impartial if ultimately confirmed.
“I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say this could have a devastating long-term effect on the legitimacy of the Supreme Court,” she argued. “ . . . I do think you have to ask yourself, ‘would a reasonable person believe that he can now fairly rule on the constitutionality of legislation passed by the very Democratic legislators that he’s screaming about?’”
Then, after Amy Coney Barrett was nominated to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Hennessey took to The Atlantic to urge Democrats to take the unprecedented step of packing the Supreme Court if Barrett was confirmed:
If Democrats can convince Republicans that confirming Barrett would result in additional justices appointed by a President Biden, perhaps Republicans would step back from the brink and refrain from confirming Barrett. But if she is confirmed, Democrats should add seats to the Court; the most common suggestion has been two, to balance out Republican appointments to Antonin Scalia’s and Ginsburg’s seats.
Hennessey appeared principally concerned with the threat that a majority conservative Supreme Court posed to her partisan interests, referring to Court-packing as a “solution” that would correct “the imbalance of a Court stacked with Republican appointees, returning both parties to something closer to an even playing field.” Of Barrett herself, Hennessey tweeted, “Amy Coney Barrett’s faith is entirely unobjectionable and between her and her creator. Her clear intention of imposing her private beliefs, including religious views, on the American public by overturning long-settled precedent should disqualify her from the bench.” Hennessey did not provide any examples or evidence to support this claim.
Hennessey’s behavior also suggests that she struggles to distinguish between national and partisan interests in a way that distorts her understanding of foreign policy developments. After Iranians shot down a Ukrainian commercial airliner with 176 civilians aboard last January. Hennessey tweeted “176 completely innocent lives, killed in the crossfire of reckless escalation,” seemingly suggesting that the tragedy was in response to the U.S. airstrike which killed Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad. However, the Iranians admitted to having mistaken the plane, which took off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport, for a cruise missile.
“The mission of the National Security Division is to carry out the Department’s highest priority: protect the United States from threats to our national security by pursuing justice through the law,” reads the DOJ’s website. DOJ has not responded to a request for comment on the responsibilities Hennessey will be entrusted with.